Edit Video Demo

[Eddiebo924]

Hello,

Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of Captivate.  But. . . (you knew that was coming).  I'm thinking the "Edit Video Demo" application inside of it needs a little more baking before it's ready for prime time. 

Yesterday I recorded about a ten minute video for inside of my production.  No issues at all recording.  For the last three hours today I've been trying to do some edits to it.  OUCH!  It's a painfully slow process.  Trying to "Trim" out sections works sometimes but when it doesn't, it does the trim but also leaves some of the audio that was removed after where the cut is made thereby duplicating it.  The only way I've been able to get around this is to Undo, Undo, Undo to the point where I made the cut, save my work, exit the app and then go back in and try again.  It's also very difficult to make the cuts exactly where you need to.  When you Edit the audio, you can see the video playing which is nice but if you can't cut from there.  If you just cut the audio, it gets out of sync with the video.  There needs to be a way to see the audio and video together and cut both of them at once.  Overall, I'm just not sanctified at all with how this portion of what is a VERY good application works.  Hopefully some Adobe QA folks and some Engineers put some time into this portion of Captivate prior to the next release.  Has anyone else out there worked with this?  Seen anything like I've described?  Or is it just me.

Until this is fixed up I'm going to do any video demo stuff in Camtasia and then just bring it into Captivate.

Thanks for listening. . .

[Captiv8r]

Yep, if you need to edit much it should be Camtasia hands down. Sooo much easier. But hey, even with its issues, it's sooo much better than it used to be!

Cheers... Rick

[Eddiebo924]

Yeah, I'm at the point now where even though I've invested the time, I'm just going to re-record and take care of things in Camtasia.

One other item that I didn't mention was that dealing with the mouse after the cuts are made.  Not really working either.  Adobe, please re-evaluate this whole section.

Thanks Much!

[Captiv8r]

I know it's a pain and perhaps you feel you "reached" Adobe by stating that they should re-evaluate this bit, but it will have MUCH more impact if you take the time to complete and submit a Bug Report.

Click here to visit the page

Cheers... Rick

[Eddiebo924]

I'll meet you half way.  🙂  I'm going to re-work it using Camtasia as I'll be able to get it done the way I want it and then circle back to my saved Captivate work and will even record some video and send in as a bug.  Deal?  can you provide the best link for submission?

Thanks Rick!

[Captiv8r]

I thought I did!

[RodWard]

Actually...although I'd agree that Camtasia is still the premier tool in video capture, Adobe's Presenter Video Creator is not bad for what it does.  It's video editing options may be very basic compared to Camtasia but it's actually REALLY easy to use and gives a good output with very little effort.

We've used it many times for the video tutorials on our own website.  Works a treat.

http://www.infosemantics.com.au/adobe-captivate/youtube-video-tutorials

[Eddiebo924]

Thanks Much Folks!  And sorry, I did miss your link there RodWard.  Got it now.  🙂

In regards to "Presenter".  Yes, it is a nice, easy tool to use, I agree with that.  It's especially powerful with it's integration with PowerPoint.  However, in my evaluation with the product, I found it to be a much lighter feature set compared to Camtasia yet costs about $200 more.  Just not right for.

But again, I thank you both for the input and I will write up a "bug report" for Adobe.  I'd really like to see them shine up that portion of Captivate, I'm sure many folks would use it.

ed

[RodWard]

I have both tools.  For the money, Camtasia is EXCELLENT value.  But if you only need to create tutorials with minimum effort and minimum time that still look great, then Presenter is well worth the extra cost.  Camtasia is more powerful, but Presenter is just sooooo easy.

[Lilybiri]

I perfectly understand what you explain, think it is also the reason why you never see a video tutorial made by Adobe (even for Captivate) with this application. I have uploaded two, but can confirm that the editing process is slow and cumbersome. Since my first trials, I only use it for very small videos to replace the old, low quality FMR-slides.

Even have/had another proposition: if at least we could open and edit the Raw file in Premiere Pro? But that is not possible, you can only open a published mp4 (which means quality loss of course).

Camtasia is a great screen recording tool

[donindallas]

I am just starting to use the Video Demonstration mode for a sizable project. The client has Cap 7 which is a good and stable release. I just got Cap 8 which is quite different and naturally not backward compatible. Captivate never supported saving to earlier versions.

I need to record some lengthy screen interactions with a lot of spinning and waiting which needs to be trimmed out. I am generating narration separately and that needs to be synced up with final flow.

One of the challenges is determining the right hierarchy of which kinds of macro edits to make in which order.

- Trim first, to short up all the moving parts?

- Mouse Edits to smooth out the movements? I am getting a lot of REALLY slow mouse pointers on the screen and see no way to move the starting point manually. That can lead to trouble with trims. 

- Zooms and pans need to go later in the process as a trim in the middle of a zoom will reset to original size.

- Transitions between trimmed areas, so after trimming. But does anyone else have trouble getting the "hand" to turn into a "pointy finger" to select the transition point?

- And then there is the challenge of narration...try to add it in the CPVC file or wait till the finished version is imported to CPTX? Since I want to use NeoSpeech TTS the latter makes sense. It is not an option in Video Editor--only import Audio. And I really wish I could chop my narration up into small pieces and space them out along the timeline (can I?) but it seems like there is only one audio track and it only allows one audio item. Or I could bind each audio clip to some off-canvas objects and position those on the timeline. Hmmm...

I also have and use Camtasia, and it is a much more straightforward tool.